


Shadows of the Past

by yopumpkinhead



Category: Coldfire Trilogy - C. S. Friedman
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 15:26:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17004234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead/pseuds/yopumpkinhead
Summary: Early during the trip to the eastern continent, Gerald Tarrant has a point to make.





	Shadows of the Past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eirenical (chibi1723)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chibi1723/gifts).



> Prompt: _Give me more about Gerald’s backstory. Does it ever play into the nightmares he spins for Damien? Give me every gory detail, if you’re so minded._
> 
> I've always been fascinated by Tarrant's single brief mention of his backstory - thank you for giving me a chance to dig into it. Happy Yuletide!

_The stairwell looms in front of him, tall and rickety, and he runs up it with barely a thought. His brothers aren’t far behind, but this stairwell will be dark to their eyes, and he knows they think its creaks and rattles mean it’s haunted. Maybe they won’t follow him._

_...They’ll follow him. They always follow him, but he runs anyway, because not running only makes them angrier. They enjoy the chase._

_He rounds a bend in the stairs and keeps going, head down, panting, his brothers’ mocking laughter loud in his ears. He still has the bruises from the last time he was careless. They throb in time with the pounding of his heartbeat, with the slap of his footsteps against the old wooden stairs. Fae-light swirls around his ankles, carrying bloody, vicious hints of his brothers’ intent._

_He should have known, should have been ready. Father is always out of sorts when returning from a trip to the palace, and takes out his anger on his sons for their mismanagement of the household in his absence. They grovel and snivel and play at humility - then take it out in turn on their youngest brother later. A nine-year-old is no match for eight brutish young men._

_But he’d been distracted, trying to sort meaning into the swirling dance and bright clatter of the fae, and hadn’t heard Father arrive. Hadn’t realized anything was wrong until Aaron backhanded him across the garden. So now he runs, breath hot in his lungs, his own gasps loud in his ears._

_He’s nearly to the top of the stairs when something in the fae-currents at his feet catches his eye. A thread of danger, violence lying in wait, and he stops running so sharply he trips. His shins bang against the wood of the steps, and one wrist catches badly on a stair-edge when he flings out his hands to break his fall. He cries out - and the fae gleams with sudden vicious intent._

_Even as he scrambles to his feet, Elliet and Logan appear on the stairs above him, their grey eyes alight with predatory glee. Fae-wisps flicker around them: red blood, black bruises, a promise of suffering._

_“I told you he’d come this way,” Logan says to Elliet, conversationally._

_Elliet smirks. “He thought he could hide. Stupid little shit, isn’t he?”_

_He’s backing away, slow and awkward on the steps, unable to take his eyes off his brothers. They’re only a few years older but twice his size, both nearly of a height with the grown men of the village. The last time Logan touched him, his meaty hands left five-fingered bruises in rings around his throat. The last time Elliet touched him, his vision had been blurry for days._

_The only thing he can be grateful for, if gratitude it can be called, is that there’s more than one of them here. Together they feed off each other’s brutal sadism, but they prefer to save their most twisted abuse for when no one else - not even their other brothers - is around to witness._

_His stomach clenches in raw terror and he can’t quite stop a whimper._

_Logan reaches for him and he turns, fleeing back down the stairs as fast as he can go, fear pounding through his body with every beat of his heart. His brothers follow him, their feet deliberately loud on the wooden steps; he wants to scream but he doesn’t have the breath for it, wants to hide but the fae lapping at his ankles is full of only pain, only violence. There’s nowhere to hide. There’s never anywhere to hide._

_He rounds the bend halfway down the staircase and crashes into something hard. Before he can react, a thick hand closes around his upper arm, lifts him effortlessly into the air. Tears blur his vision, of pain and fear alike, as he recognizes Aaron. The fae reflects his terror back at him, amplified by Logan and Elliet’s laughter as they saunter up behind him._

_Aaron says, “You shouldn’t have run.” Then he turns and flings him, and he’s flying down the stairs, sharp wooden corners rushing past in a blur below, and he has a moment to be terrified before he cracks against them and pain flares throughout his body, pounding against his bones, beating against his skin, his eardrums as he falls—_

_thumping, crashing, banging—_

“Rev! Reverend!”

_something’s wrong and he struggles to think past the pain, the terror of looking up from where he’s sprawled limp and helpless at the base of the stairs, the hulking looming silhouettes of his brothers approaching—_

“Vryce!”

_his brothers looming over him, their hands reaching, grasping—_

“Wake up!”

Damien’s eyes snapped open.

For a horrible long moment he had no idea where he was. Dim moonlight leaked around a doorframe, illuminating a cramped room. Wooden walls, low ceiling, the narrow bunk on which Damien lay. The whole thing swayed gently, and he nearly threw up, the nightmare of free-falling above a hard staircase roiling in his stomach.

Nightmare. Fear. Cold silver eyes and a deadly hunger.

_Damn you, Hunter_ , he thought wearily, and scrubbed a hand over his face. He remembered now: he was aboard the _Golden Glory_ , the ship he’d commissioned for an expedition to the eastern continent. Gerald Tarrant, the Neocount of Merentha, the Hunter, had joined them. And Damien had agreed to the same bargain they’d made in the rakhlands: his own nightmares for the Hunter’s sustenance.

Whoever had been pounding on his door was still out there; a man’s voice called again, “Rev! Captain needs you quick, there’s been an accident.”

“Coming,” he called. His voice came out steadier than he’d expected, and he hauled himself upright. Sweat soaked his blankets, his hair; he wasn’t anything remotely like presentable but if there’d been an accident no one would care. Damien pulled on yesterday’s pants, then considered his boots for a moment before deciding against it. None of the sailors wore shoes, and Damien was learning the merits of having one’s toes free to grip the sea-slicked deck.

Outside his cabin, the night sky was just beginning to give way to dawn’s light, the horizon growing brighter by the minute. The sailor who’d woken him led Damien across the deck to where Captain Rozca crouched beside a different sailor. Lamp light illuminated a long gash down the outside of the sailor’s thigh, and blood pooled on the deck beneath her.

Damien cursed and hurried closer. Out here on the sea, with the earth-fae on the ocean floor so far beneath them that it might as well not exist at all, he couldn’t Heal - but he was still trained in medicine and the treatment of wounds. Yet another sailor appeared at his elbow with the ship’s medical supply kit, and Damien reached for it even as he knelt beside the woman. There was a lot of blood, but the damage wasn't deep, thank God. “It’s going to need stitches,” he warned her.

She made a sound that might have been an attempt at a laugh. “Just make sure the scar’s pretty.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he agreed, and set to work, the memories of Tarrant’s crafted nightmare fading as he focused on tending the living.

*           *           *

Later, after the sailor’s wound had been stitched and she’d been carried to a cabin for rest, Damien found himself thinking about the nightmare again. It was a far cry from the Hunter’s typical running-through-a-dark-forest fare. There’d been something familiar about it, as though Damien should have recognized the young men.

It wasn’t until midafternoon that he realized why their grey eyes had been so familiar, and the thought was so distracting that Rozca banned him from the deck because sailors kept tripping over him where he stood lost in thought. Damien retreated to his cabin, impatient and restless, and emerged again the moment night fell.

He’d hoped Tarrant would appear on the deck as well, but apparently the Hunter felt no urgency to leave his lightless sanctuary in the bowels of the ship. It was a full two hours past sunset, and Damien was beginning to think the Hunter was staying belowdecks deliberately, just to annoy him, when Tarrant finally emerged. He crossed the deck to stand at the ship’s rail, eyes on the stars overhead as if trying to read meaning from them. Occasionally he dropped his gaze to a small notebook balanced carefully on the railing, making notes or corrections to the pages.

Damien watched him for a few minutes, but Tarrant made no move to acknowledge his presence, apparently intent on whatever he was doing. Damien was pretty sure the bastard knew exactly what he wanted to ask, and was ignoring him on purpose. Still, Damien made himself wait, leaning against the railing, until Tarrant finished writing in the notebook and tucked it into a pocket of his robes.

Only then did Damien say, “That was you. This morning, in the dream. That wasn’t something you just made up.”

Silver eyes slid his way, disdainful. “Your powers of deduction are remarkable,” Tarrant said dryly.

“Why?” Damien demanded. “Why show me that?”

The silver gaze became, if anything, more disdainful. “I need fear to survive, priest,” Tarrant said. “You know that. You agreed to it.”

Damien glared at him. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. It’s not like you to make a pity play, Hunter.”

“Of course not,” Tarrant answered. “Pity provides me no sustenance. And even if it did, priest, I wouldn’t want yours.”

“Then why?”

Tarrant was silent for a long moment. The sea winds whipped his golden hair around his face, casting flickering shadows over his eyes from the light of a single dim moon. He said, “You didn’t believe me.”

Taken aback, Damien frowned. “What?”

“In the rakhlands,” Tarrant clarified. “You didn’t believe I might know what it is to be weak.”

“I never said that,” Damien protested.

“You didn’t have to,” Tarrant said. “I know how you see me.”

Damien sighed. “Okay, fine,” he said. “So I didn’t believe you then. I still don’t see why you’d show me something like that.” Because if there was anything he’d learned about the man during their travels, it was that Gerald Tarrant hated to be vulnerable. Hated to be at the mercy of anyone or anything, and went to great lengths to ensure he was never in such a position. Yet the child Gerald in the dream had been horribly vulnerable, helpless in the face of his older brothers’ brute might.

Tarrant gave a soft laugh and turned away, staring out across the water, though Damien suspected his focus was inward - on the memories he’d shown him. Finally he said, “I won’t insult your intelligence by asking you to trust me, priest. You know what I am, better than most men. But I need you to know where I stand. Where I’m coming from.” He hesitated, just for a moment, but Damien had spent enough time traveling with the man to catch it.   

“Hunter,” he said quietly, then, “Tarrant.”

The Hunter shook his head, golden hair shining in Domina’s light. “I told you then that the Master of Lema and I are not so different, in some ways. I was vulnerable once, priest. I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure I am not vulnerable again.” He met Damien’s eyes; backlit by the moon his gaze was a hungry black void. “I trust you understand.”

Without waiting for a response, Tarrant made a shallow, perfectly courteous bow, and strode away across the deck. Damien watched him disappear into the hold, a cold chill running down his spine. Tarrant’s words were an unsettling echo of what Damien had been thinking just a minute ago - had Damien really come to understand the man that well? Or was it the bond between them, which seemed to grow stronger every day they spent at sea? Neither option was pleasant.

Damien closed his eyes. _God, I am always and forever your servant_ , he prayed.  _I’ve bound myself to this man because I seek to destroy an even worse darkness. His power is all that gives me a chance against such a foe. Please… help me to not stray from Your path. Guard my soul against the darkness in his. Help me do this task, Lord, and not lose myself to the same evil which trapped Your prophet._

The sea winds rattled the sails overhead, and clouds drifted across the single moon, casting shadows along the deck. Alone at the railing, Damien Vryce shivered.

*           *           *

_The goblet in his hand shakes, red wine like blood sloshing over the lip onto the table. The house is empty; he sent his wife and sons to her mother’s the moment he got the letter about Logan. He huddles alone in the chair beside the fire, though its warmth does nothing to chase the chill from his bones._

_Elliet was the first to die, nearly three years ago in their father’s house, gutted like a chicken and strung up by his intestines. Williem was next, four months later in the village nearby, impaled from groin to chin and left to rot in the pigsty. The pigs had eaten him up to the thighs before he was found. Five more deaths in the years since, moving through his brothers, steadily east._

_To him._

_Logan was the latest death, and though the constable who wrote the letter tried to be delicate, it was obvious the killer had taken their time. Now, alone in his study, he can think of nothing but what the killer will do to him._

_A floorboard creaks. Fear spikes through him. He whips about, eyes struggling against the shadows. He’s lit lamps throughout the house, covered every flat surface with shrines to all the local godlings, had twelve different priests cast blessings against evil. But shadows creep steadily further into the room, and a chill shudders down his spine._

_He shoves to his feet, grabs the sword propped against his chair. Tries to ignore the way it shakes in his hands as he faces the crawling darkness._

_“Show yourself!” he bellows. “Murderer! Demonic coward!”_

_No answer._

_Something cracks behind him and he spins, swinging the sword, decapitating a small clay idol on the mantel. No one is there; the crackling was only the wood of the fire settling._

_Wasn’t it?_

_Another sound, a susurrus of fabric against the woolen rug, and he spins again. But though the shadows have grown ever deeper, still no killer - man or demon - makes itself known._

_“Coward!” he roars again. “Face me!”_

_A soft laugh curls out of the darkness, wraps about him like a lover’s caress. He definitely didn’t imagine that - yet he can see nothing still. He turns this way and that, brandishing the sword. The laughter grows, fractures, until it’s no longer one voice but many, all laughing coldly. Terror chokes him, weighs down his limbs, the sword growing heavy in his hands._

_“Who are you?” he demands. Or tries to; his voice sounds pathetically weak even to him. Pleading. “What do you want?”_

_The many-echoed laughter resolves into a single voice once more, coming from directly behind him. He whips about - and freezes in fear, for in the light of the guttering fire stands the figure of a man. Tall, slim, draped in elegant robes, golden hair caught back with a simple circlet of metal. And he stares, because he knows that face, knows the silver gaze that watches him with a predator’s hunger._

_“Gerald…” he whispers._

_His youngest brother, supposedly dead five years ago, smiles at him. The silver eyes glimmer with vicious glee - then darken, an empty black whirlpool in their depths. “Hello, Aaron,” he says._

_The last thing he sees is those eyes. The last thing he hears is his own shrieks of terror and agony as his dead brother dismembers him._

Damien jerked awake to the darkness of his cabin on the ship once more, drenched in sweat and shaking with fear. _Damn you, Tarrant_ , he thought wearily.

Through the channel between them, he felt the Hunter’s quiet, satisfied laughter.


End file.
